Good News For Spies and Dictators: ‘FreedomBox’ Is in Danger of an Early Death

It’s a developers’ nightmare word: vaporware – a term for hyped new software that’s never delivered. FreedomBox, an ambitious free-software project designed to embed privacy and security into netizens’ routers, seems on the verge of earning that label, risking becoming the Duke Nukem Forever of privacy-enhancing software.

Which would be a sad fate for a project that aimed at freeing the world from the shackles of centralized communication services like Facebook, Gmail and AIM.

The FreedomBox is basically a router shot through with free-software. Once plugged into your home network, it will “protect your security, your privacy and your anonymity while you use the internet,” said James Vasile, the executive director of the FreedomBox Foundation, the nonprofit which was formed to develop the technology using more than $85,000 raised on Kickstarter.

The ultimate goal is to give every internet user, no matter how technophobic, a simple tool that can protect their data from prying hands, be it from ruthless hackers, nosy neighbors, profiling algorithms or repressive governments. The box can either replace a current router or simply sit between an existing router and a modem.

“That is turnkey privacy. It’s turnkey anonymity. It’s turnkey security,” said James Vasile in an October presentation introducing the FreedomBox. “We’re going try to make privacy, freedom, security, anonymity as easy and convenient as what you have now, which is the exact opposite of all of those things.”

On June 7, one of the project’s main developers, Nick Daly, posted a seemingly contradictory message in the official mailing list announcing something that’s been long-awaited: a beta release.

But at the same time, Daly, who just came back from Rio de Janeiro’s Human Rights and Technology Conference, lamented the talk of vaporware he heard from many people there. Noting that it’s been a year and a half since the FreedomBox Foundation was launched, he issued a call to arms:

“We really should have more development work to show for it,” he wrote. “Join us and ask anyone you know to take part in the project.”

In an e-mail, Daly told Threat Level that setting the end of the year as the goal for the initial beta-release is intentionally ambitious. He hopes that “people will see the fact that we probably won’t make it without additional developers as an excuse to join the project.”

It’s not uncommon for an open source project to go through some growing pains, of course. Diaspora, an open source social networking service intended to take down Facebook, was inspired by the same ideals as the FreedomBox, and has had its share of troubles living up to large expectations.

But it seems like it has come time for FreedomBox to prove it’s for real.

“What do we need?” he asked in his slightly pinched voice. “We need a really good webserver you can put in your pocket and plug in any place.”

That initial, raw conceptualization has been growing less foggy in the past two years.

To achieve this ambitious objective, the small plugserver will include tools like the popular anonymizing “onion router” software Tor, as well as a system to find other FreedomBoxes around the world, called Freedom Buddy. Once perfected, the system will allow users trapped behind a national firewall to connect to the internet via a trusted person using another FreedomBox in a country with no restrictions. The idea is for that person to become “your lifeline, your connection to the outside world. He will be your buddy to freedom,” Vasile said.

VPN software, another tool to help keep your connection private, is included in the setup. Other partially developed features include a a Jabber server to allow for encrypted chat and privoxy, a web-filtering tool that upgrades your connection to SSL, while removing ads from the sites you visit.

How much will be up and running in the beta-release, however, is unclear (Daly wrote in an e-mail that Tor, e-mail and Jabber won’t be included) and it will probably depend on the success of Daly’s call for vaporware prevention. Vaporware talks aside, everybody involved in the project knows that for FreedomBox to become reality, it must be as easy to use as possible.

“The infrastructure is there, but to make it happen, we still need to do the step of making it usable to end users,” Vasile said in a phone interview.

According to Moglen, the software needs to be easy to navigate and attractive — not things usually associated with open source projects.

“In order to save freedom,” he said in an interview with Threat Level, “we must become the other things that the software industry has become in our time: makers of simple technology that ordinary people like to use.”

If the developers can’t figure that out, FreedomBox will never break from the geek-world to a broader audience. That is going to be the biggest challenge and the programmers are well aware of it.

“We want to lower the barriers of entry,” Vasile said. “We want to try to take the barrier down far enough that we capture more people and we enable more people to join the privacy revolution.”

They will also have to convince people who get their routers for free from their internet providers to buy a new one. The FreedomBox currently costs around $100, although Moglen estimates it could get as cheap as $29 over time, as production increases. “At the end of the day,” said Chris Soghoian, an Open Society fellow and a privacy rabble-rouser, “what’s gonna make this either sink or swim, it’s gonna be the economics.” According to him, however, the technology they’re trying to create is achievable.

Peter Eckersley, the Technology Projects Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, acknowledges that parts of the project are “pretty ambitious,” although he agrees with Soghoian. “There are whole other low-hanging fruit that you can put onto an always-connected server that you can give to people – a FreedomBox – that would be of tremendous use.”

Free-software projects aimed at enhancing privacy have had a long history of struggles.

PGP e-mail encryption, created by Phil Zimmerman in the ’90s, even though widely used now by corporations and the tech savvy, has never gone mainstream.

Diaspora, a distributed social network that was born out of that same speech Moglen gave in 2010, and raised around $200,000 on Kickstarter, has somewhat floundered after initially showing great promise — although it seems to have gotten new life after being selected to join the Valley’s most prestigious start-up boot camp, YCombinator, for the summer.

Moglen admits that FreedomBox, just like any other free software project before it, faces tremendous challenges. But its fate is not written in stone.

“FreedomBox is not going to be saved by the enthusiasm of those who care about freedom,” he said, while pacing in his office at the Software Freedom Law Center in Manhattan. “It’s going to be saved from that fate because that software stack is going to be useful to all kinds of people for all kinds of purposes.”

It might also be just the right time for it to succeed. “There is a clear demand in the market for privacy preserving technologies,” said Soghoian. “I don’t know if FreedomBox are going to be the right people to deliver that, but at some point somebody is going to figure out how to do this and they’re going to be very successful.”

Two years since its conception, the future of FreedomBox is still a question mark. Slow development aside, there are issues of leadership as well. Vasile, who’s led the effort since the beginning, has been named the new director for the New America Foundation Open Internet Tools Project and will split his time between D.C. and New York; Moglen himself will gradually “step away,” as he told Threat Level.

And there will be changes in the management, but those “will indicate that the project is doing what all free software projects do, which is beginning to raise its own leadership internally,” he said.

Despite the skepticism and talks of vaporware, Moglen believes the project has already been a success. “I think we’ve passed the point where no matter what happens, we will leave good technology behind,” he said.

If the project does not pick up the pace in the next few months, though, that’ll be the most generous obituary the project will likely get.